Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [11]
‘And they didn’t bother to tell you?’
He shrugged. ‘You’ll soon learn that we’re regarded as the lowest in the food chain, Michelle. We’re the bottom-feeders, the ones who do the dirty jobs for peanuts, and know fuck-all about anything. No one thinks they need to tell us anything, and the only time we get any feedback is when someone wants to bollock us.’
He said this in a tone of resigned cheeriness, but I could hear the bitterness underlying the words.
SIX
It was the following week, the weather surprisingly warm for April, that Barry Patterson came into my life and, like most of the men I have known, he proved to be a problem. He wasn’t just any man, though. Far from it. Mr Barry Patterson was forty stone and he made his first appearance on a Friday.
When the doorbell rings, you never know what you’re going to discover and, in this case, when Graham opened the door, what greeted him were four huge undertakers, all sweating and cursing. They had between them a loose stretcher placed on a collapsible gurney; as it was pushed in, there was an ominous whining from it, as if the whole mechanism was under an intolerable strain and liable to collapse at any moment. On it was a gigantic mound underneath a huge cover that could have been three bodies snuggled together; to cap it all, the cover seemed to be struggling to cope with its contents. There were the usual greetings and then the undertakers took this monstrosity into the body store.
I was wondering what was going on, but Clive and Graham both knew and it brought them nothing but depression. I was desperate to find out more, but no one said a word as they manhandled this mound, with a lot of struggling and no little swearing, onto our hydraulic trolley which then proceeded to collapse to its lowest point, as if giving up all hope. The cover was removed, and in front of us lay the most obese person I have ever seen in my life. The undertakers began to tell us the whole story.
Mr Patterson had been complaining of shortness of breath (not surprising, weighing that much) and a doctor had been called but, unfortunately, he had died before the doctor arrived. The family had rung for an ambulance but the ambulance crew did not have the equipment to cope with the removal of such a large human being. The Coroner’s officer had then been contacted, who had called in some undertakers for the removal of the body, but not even two seventeen-stone men with hands like shovels and two assistants who were not much smaller could move him. The only solution was to call on the fire brigade. Mr Barry Patterson had only been removed from his last resting place with the help of several burly firemen and a heavyweight hoist. After that, it took six men to lift him onto the stretcher using various straps and lifting equipment. I often wonder if the family are present when such a body is being removed from a house; do they feel any embarrassment at the events unfolding before them?
The undertakers left the mortuary and I began to discover all the problems that such people bring. Our only decent trolley had a forty-stone body on it, but it was designed to take no more than thirty-five stone, and had therefore seized up under the weight. Moreover, the mortuary has enough fridge space for twenty-eight bodies, including four larger patients. A larger patient in the days when the mortuary was designed was probably about twenty-five stone maximum. There was absolutely no way that Mr Patterson was going to allow himself to be refrigerated and so he was going to have to stay on our trolley at room temperature until a post-mortem was ordered by the Coroner. As it was Friday afternoon, the earliest that that was going to happen was Monday. Since, if a body is not cooled, it starts to rot, this was what was going to happen to Mr Patterson. A couple of days would not make a lot of difference, but any longer and Clive explained that he